Technical Field
The present application relates in general to systems and methods which use a geo-fence for supporting operations in environments such as in a retail store. In particular, examples relate to an apparatus and a method which use a geo-fence to assist with order collection in a retail store.
Description of Related Art
Traditionally, a customer gathers a basket or shopping cart holding goods for purchase in a retail store and then pays for those goods at a point of sale terminal or checkout. Increasingly, modern retailers provide facilities which allow a customer to order goods remotely, such as over the Internet, so that the customer does not have to be present at a store in order to purchase goods of interest. In some instances, the remotely ordered items are delivered directly to the customer's home. However, in other instances, customers may instead wish to collect the remotely ordered items from a retail store, or other a suitable collection point. Furthermore, the long opening hours and convenient locations of modern retail stores, or like collection points, can make a collection of goods preferable to relying on delivery services.
Modern retail stores offer a diverse selection of goods, including foodstuffs, electronics goods, clothing, home and kitchen goods, and so on. For some time, customers have been able to remotely order many types of non-perishable goods (e.g. electronics goods or clothing). More recently, the online ordering facility has been extended to encompass other types of perishable goods (e.g. fresh foodstuffs).
In the case of electronics goods, clothing, home and kitchen goods and the like, the remotely ordered items typically are held within an operational area, such as a warehouse, where they may reside until needed in order to fulfill a customer order. In other cases, such as perishables such as foodstuffs, the goods may need to be gathered from special storage areas (e.g. refrigerated or frozen storage), or from display units which may be within a sales area of the store. In either case, collating the desired basket of ordered goods may take a non-trivial amount of time, and a customer arriving at a retail store to collect their order may be inconvenienced as a consequence.
In one example system, customers may be given a specific collection time, or time window, and the order is prepared in advance of the expected collection time. However, such a system lacks flexibility and may be inconvenient to the customer. Notably, the collection point may need to serve large numbers of customers quickly and efficiently. In some examples, the collection point may only have a limited capacity for appropriate storage of goods to be collected, and it may be desirable to make more efficient use of that storage capacity. In some examples, having brought together the relevant basket of goods from different areas (e.g. warehouse, clothing, cold storage, frozen storage), there may then be a time limit on storing those goods in a staging area waiting for collection by the customer.
It is an aim of some examples to address at least some of the above difficulties, or other difficulties which will be appreciated from the description herein. It is a further aim to provide a more efficient and cost effective apparatus and method which improves operational support in a retail store or similar environment.